At SXSW today, Parse co-founder and CEO Ilya Sukhar announced Facebook’s F8 conference will be held this year on April 30 at the San Francisco Design Concourse. That the announcement comes from Sukhar is fitting because Facebook, Instagram, as well as Parse engineers and product team members will be available throughout the conference to provide 1:1 help and advice.
The conference will be a little different this year: it will be squarely aimed at developers eager to learn how to best use Facebook, Instagram, and Parse to build, grow, and monetize their apps. The company is promising a full day of technical sessions and hands-on labs, open to more than 1,500 mobile and Web developers from all over the world.
By having a pure developer conference, Facebook says it is “going back to its roots.” The first F8 event, held in May 2007, introduced developers to the social graph. In July 2008, Facebook showed off Facebook Connect for websites, but also introduced a new profile design. In April 2010, Facebook unveiled social plugins (including the Like button), the Open Graph Protocol, Graph API, and OAuth 2.0 support. In September 2011, Facebook introduced the Timeline profile and a broader version of its Open Graph.
In 2012 and 2013, Facebook chose not to host F8 in favor of multiple smaller events. Now, three years later, the company looks eager to build on its Parse acquisition. If we are to believe the message going out today, there won’t be much user-focused news at F8. That being said, if Facebook has decided to bring back its only major conference, chances are it has something notable to share.
F8 2014 will open with a morning keynote, followed by four tracks that cover getting started guides, technical best practices, infrastructure strategies, engineering deep dives, and advertising tips for apps and games. Facebook says it will also have sessions dedicated to open source technologies.
Facebook will start accepting applications for the event “soon.”
Top Image Credit: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
